Chuck Klosterman wears many hats: He writes the “Ethicist” column for
TheNew York Times; covers sports for ESPN; and, as the author of the alternately despised and
idolized
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, remains an unrepentant fan of pop culture.

The hat that makes him most curious, however, is that of the villain.

He understands wanting to be good, or at least wanting to seem good — but why, he asks, “would
anyone
want to be evil?” What if you were the villain of the story you constantly tell yourself
about your life — rather than the hero? And: “What’s scarier, a villain with a motive, or a villain
without one?”

I Wear the Black Hat explores the question of villainy in a series of rambunctious essays
that range through characters both historical and more recent, fictional and not.

Some of the essays are thoroughly, and comically, personal. One starts as a meditation on the
Eagles’
Take It Easy, a song Klosterman says is universally despised by rock critics, and the
moment in 2003 when Klosterman had the sudden, “mostly positive — but highly uncomfortable —
realization” that “I no longer possessed the capacity to hate rock bands.”

It then heads back to 1984, when Klosterman was 12, and, year by year, lists the artists that he
regarded as villainous and why — including, but not limited to, Bruce Springsteen and his
"generic-yet-kinetic clothing,” the Red Hot Chili Peppers (“like all the idiots at my college who
were constantly starting terrible bands and failing organic chemistry”), and the Moody Blues (“like
dead people I was supposed to learn about on PBS”).

Other essays take on villains from Machiavelli to Snidely Whiplash, O.J. Simpson, Joe Paterno,
Bill Clinton and Hitler, “the universal placeholder for evil” — a chapter about whom Klosterman
felt obliged to include under pressure from almost everyone he consulted but about whom he felt
unqualified to write from his position as a “nonserious non-Jew, a literary category I
dominate."

Oddly — or maybe not — Klosterman tends to focus on people and events from the 1990s, when he
was young and most vividly reactive. Therefore, some readers, particularly younger ones, might be
led to wonder what all the fuss is about.

There’s sort of a thesis here: Klosterman sets out to prove that, “in any situation, the villain
is the one who knows the most and cares the least.” But mostly, he sets out one provocative,
hyperbolic argument after another: Any reader who can’t find something to argue with here is
probably brain-dead, or very, very mellow.

Without being pretentious or difficult, Klosterman raises questions about evil and identity that
resonate further than the specific people and characters he considers.